dustymc
commented
4 months ago Can you put null in the field
If you mean an attribute value, no.
precedent
There is a well established mechanism for saying "we have no information" - the value cannot/should not be NULL, the attribute/concept can and should. It's also pretty nice to use - just do nothing.
If you did find some other way to say "we have no information" and have any interest in consistency, you would need to do that for everything, and go back and do it for any new things that get added in the future.
https://arctos.database.museum/info/ctDocumentation.cfm?table=ctprocessing_history#transcribed_from_ledger may do what you're trying to do.
For the NSF RANGES project, we are gathering tons of body measurements and reproductive remarks. As expected, many were not recorded. So, to avoid going back to the specimens or journals repeatedly to verify, how do people populate Arctos for, say, no weight taken? Can you put null in the field, but no weight taken in a remark? Or, just put no weight taken in a more general remark? Or in unformatted measurements which is alphanumeric? Hoping there is some reasonable precedent.